Multilingualism always existed. All over the world at any era many different languages always co-existed. Pre-national and pre-capitalist societies roughly succeeded in maintaining a balance between these different languages. But the emergence in the XIXth century of nation- states and the XXth century economic globalization shattered this balance. Gradually countries having a single language used by the majority of the population (e.g. Britain, USA, France, Germany) extended their domination over their political allied countries and more generally all over the world by means of colonial empires. English is nowadays viewed as the one language prevailing. Hopefully escaping such a supremacy of English is possible: languages are no natural forces, but tools designed to be used by humans able to master them.

Hervé ADAMI & Virginie ANDRÉ (Université de Lorraine / CNRS-ATILF)

Processes of adult language security: social trajectories and learning paths

2014, Vol. XIX-2, pp. 71-83

Certain adults, migrants or native French speakers, suffer from language insecurity, i.e. they have repertoires that are incomplete or are too unvaried to deal efficiently with the different communications situations they participate in, in particular those that fall outside the usual limits of their interactions. The duration and the scale of recent economic and social changes mean that there is little scope for these people in the labour market, and they are socially marginalized. Some of these people participate in integration or insertion initiatives that sometimes include language training. The authors define language insecurity according to this situation and they show how it can be useful for analysing the reality it describes and for suggesting solutions in adulte ducation.